BookBrowse Reviews Pink Slime by Fernanda Trias

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A gripping story of one woman's life during environmental and societal collapse by an award-winning Uruguayan novelist.

Unsurprisingly, the 21st century has been something of a boom time for environmental disaster in fiction. The vein of anxiety over what humans are doing to the planet runs deep—stretching back to the 1970s, when films like Soylent Green and Logan's Run imagined far-off civilizational collapse—but recent novels like Omar El Akkad's American War and Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation have found acclaim with more proximate, recognizable visions of Mother Nature taking her revenge. Pink Slime, the gripping novel by National Uruguayan Literature Prize-winner Fernanda Trías (newly translated from Spanish by Heather Cleary), steps right into this tradition, presenting an unsettlingly plausible near future in which human beings have finally succeeded in knocking out their delicate ecosystem for good.

Trías's setting is more peri-apocalyptic than post; life in the unnamed coastal city hasn't ended with a bang, but instead weathers a long, drawn-out death rattle. People go stubbornly about their business, but it's been some time since the last bird was seen in the sky, and even longer since the ocean's last fish washed up dead on the shore. An unexplained crimson algae has poisoned the sea and rivers, and its deadly fumes—rumored to be noxious enough to flay a person down to the muscle—periodically send the city into lockdown when they blow in from the coast.

Far inland, safe from this ominous "red wind," an emboldened Ministry of Health governs the country through an Orwellian combination of opacity and slogans. ("Every life is unique," they repeatedly proclaim as justification for their ever-harsher measures.) To save the population from food shortages, the Ministry has inaugurated a new food-processing plant. Its star product is an "insipid, colorless, odorless" protein paste called Meatrite; those who produce it, however, know it simply as pink slime. Trías excels at gruesome descriptions of this ultra-processed monstrosity, but she knows too the power of leaving things unsaid. Where pink slime comes from, how it's made, and its worrying connection to the similarly colored algae infecting the coast are just a few of the mysteries left tantalizingly in place.

An unnamed narrator guides the reader through this reality—albeit obliquely. A woman of 40, recently divorced and newly out of work, she takes the end of the world as just another of her daily struggles. More present in her thoughts than the apocalypse are Max, the ex-husband for whom she still harbors conflicted feelings, and her mother, whose domineering presence is felt even in her absence. If the narrator knows she should follow her mother's advice and cut ties with Max, their tangled history makes this easier said than done—especially now that he finds himself in a chronic care ward, having been exposed to the vicious red wind.

To confound matters, the narrator is caring for Mauro, the child of a wealthy couple no longer willing to deal with his disability. Mauro's syndrome causes an insatiable hunger, compelling him to eat everything he can get his hands on no matter the damage it could do. Given the novel's themes, another author might have been tempted to reduce Mauro to a simple cipher of humanity's self-destructive greed. Thankfully, the depth and complexity of the narrator's feelings for the boy prevent his disability from being interpreted as a symbol rather than a human reality, and through this character Trías delivers a thoughtful, three-dimensional portrayal of what this particular reality might look like.

The narrative bones of Pink Slime may be those of a straightforward family drama, but Trías enjoys wrapping them in some meaty experimentation. Like the eponymous pink paste, however, the philosophical musings and stylistic flair that pepper her writing are only somewhat nourishing. The novel may touch on all the weightiest contemporary concerns—environmental disaster, democratic backsliding, class inequality—but it's the knotty personal relationships that give it such a strong emotional core.

Trías is expert in drawing out the paradoxes of these relationships, stretching the web of love and resentment, obligation and self-preservation in which the narrator finds herself caught. That society is collapsing seems almost incidental; the reader is gripped to this novel's compelling end as much by the quiet, personal disaster unfolding in the narrator's life as by the disaster unfolding in the streets. However plausible, the apocalypse Pink Slime offers up is imagined. The emotions that form its spine, on the other hand, are powerfully real.

This review first ran in the August 21, 2024 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.